Artificial intelligence to make cats talk

There is a moment in Finding Nemo, in which Dory makes a deep voice and says that she can speak whale.. In the real world, the chances that a Paracanthurus hepatus would want to ask a whale for help to find a clownfish are remote, but thanks to generative Artificial Intelligence, we are not that far from a fish speaking to us with the voice of Anabel Alonso .

Until now, everything we knew about animal communication we had learned with human eyes, human ears and human brain.. We have even submerged ourselves, ourselves and our junk, in the ocean and in the jungle for weeks and years to approach the impossible of perceiving the world as a gorilla or a sperm whale.. «If the lion could speak», said the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, «we would not understand it», due to the sidereal distance between our human mind, and our concepts of human, compared to the sensory and conceptual landscape of characters such as an octopus or a bat.

Artificial Intelligence aspires to become the missing link. In the tool capable of finding points of convergence between our language and any other, in the same way that we would ask it if an alien ship arrived on earth. If it is helping us to translate Babylonian texts, why is it not going to serve to convert a 34-million-year-old language and culture like that of the sperm whale, into our phonemes of barely 2.5 million?

Dozens of projects are currently investigating the potential of artificial intelligence to make us an animal Google Translator, collecting acoustic, chemical, electrical, chromatic, vibration, group dance signals and everything at the same time; putting cryptographers, linguists, marine biologists and robotics specialists to work together. And all knowing that we will find holes that seem insurmountable like the ultraviolet range of the visual spectrum of some bees or birds, or the ultrasonic range of bats, dolphins and dogs.

The Earth Species Project (ESP) is cataloging, among others, the calls of Hawaiian crows and the sound of belugas in the St. Lawrence River; Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), aims to decipher the language of sperm whales, DeepSqueak is a software that uses learning algorithms to identify, process and categorize the ultrasonic sounds of rodents; Communication and Coordination Across Scales (CCAS), has focused on the information flows of populations of meerkats, coatis, and hyenas, which it has filled with biorecorder collars.. There is also the Vocal Interactivity in-and-between Humans, and Animals and Robots (VIHAR) Project and Interspecies Internet. In a workshop of the latter in 2019, Roger Payne, one of the discoverers of humpback whale song, assured that we could soon ask a dolphin if it is afraid of boats, or sharks, and if its mother is too, or which shark scares you the most. Even, he explained, “we could find out if dolphins lie regularly like humans…. I'd be surprised if they didn't.”

The technology could be available to anyone through a mobile phone app, as Denise Herzing, founder and director of research at the non-profit Wild Dolphin Project, warned in a 2013 TED.

Removal of a biomarker from a hyena. CCAS PROJECT

Before the advent of generative artificial intelligence, we had already taken giant steps in bioacoustics. Karen Bakker explains in the book The Sounds of Life that bats vocalize, seem to call each other by name, remember favors and can be spiteful. We know that dolphins communicate with whistles produced by the vibration of their noses, that they call each other by name, and that they speak dolphin in long conversations like Dory spoke whale.. The machine learning algorithm Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (Chat) managed to make a new sound in the dolphin language so that they could identify it with some floating seaweed that they sometimes played with.

Within one to three years, Aza Raskin, one of the co-founders of the Earth Species Project, predicts that algorithms will be able to make new words for many animals, and that a crow or a whale will not be able to tell that they are not talking to one of them. theirs, although there is a problem: “We may be able to start a conversation before we understand what we are saying.”

Logic tells us that we will have it easier with gorillas, more complicated with the dance of bees to signal nectar, and almost impossible, for example, with the quasi-alien biology of octopuses, and to demonstrate an intelligence capable of opening jars, solving simple mathematical operations, boycotting laboratory lights with jets of water, escaping from a tank when no one is looking, or putting away objects that are of no use to you, perhaps just because they look pretty to you. The last common ancestor we share with chimpanzees lived between six and eight million years ago, while the last one we share with octopuses lived in the Precambrian seas almost 700 million years ago.

A drone takes data from a sperm whale in the Interspecies Internet project. OCEAN ALLIANCE

The main objective of all this would be the conservation of species, recognizing their needs, their perception of the world and life, looking for their well-being and perhaps that they teach us things, for example, to save the planet, or discover their plans to attack us.. «More than 8 million species share our planet, but we only understand the language of one. A better understanding of animal communication in general could inject more empathy and interest into conservation efforts, which in turn could help reduce some of the problems humans have caused ecosystems around the world,” says Katie. Zacarian, executive director of the Earth Species Project (ESP).

But scientists also warn of certain risks, because animals can be more easily tricked into luring them for consumption or exploitation, like the acoustic signals already used by poachers, and even for military purposes.. Advanced chatbots allow researchers to initiate a conversation with an animal before they actually know what they are saying, which could lead to unintended effects, as noted in an article published in Science.. For example, the reproduction of sounds by wild humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) could unexpectedly trigger anything from mass strandings to changes in their singing at ocean level.

The same tool would also serve to create soundscapes beyond individual communication, and develop tools capable of examining the movements of animals recorded by satellite in search of signs of disease, stress or attempts to escape from humans.

Among the researchers who have done the most to communicate with animals, we could point out the primatologist Jane Goodall, who at 89 stated after learning about these AI programs: «Since I was a child, I dreamed of understanding what animals say. How wonderful that it is now a real possibility.